#Navy Brat

[b00knerd1o1]

Moving sucks

One thing I rarely see people talk about is how hard it can be to unpack your stuff after a move. In the beginning, you're really excited. You've been living without most of your clothing and other positions for who knows how long, and now you finally get to have them back. You open one box after another until you find it. A broken or damaged item. A precious memory of the life you've just left reduced to tiny fragments or bent out of shape. It crushes your spirit, but you move on until you find another and then another. The joy you felt finally getting you're stuff back is completely gone, and instead, before you sits a physical reminder of your sorrow over leaving your previous home and your anxiety about your new one.

As a military brat, I went through this proses every two to three years, and it never got any easier. One day you leave the house you've worked so hard to make a home fully intact, and when you get back, the movers have completely gutted it. Despite only living in the house for a couple years, its emptiness is so overwhelming. Now all your stuff is in the hands of people you barely know, and you have to trust it will reach its destination safely, but you know some of it won't.

I just got my stuff back, and I started unpacking, but I gave up. My room is littered with boxes, but I have no energy to finish. Some people might think that military families have it easy because people do most of the work for us, but moving is still a major struggle for us. When you move constantly, the only permanent thing in your life is your possessions, so to see them broken and damaged is heartbreaking.

[perfectlysteadyzombie]

Skeeter Eater. (Or Mosquiter Eater, if you're feeling formal. )

[voguegenics]

Happy 249th Birthday, U.S. Navy! 🎉⚓️

🎉⚓️ Happy 249th Birthday, U.S. Navy! Join me in celebrating the brave sailors and their families who embody courage and honor. I raise my glass to the winds at your back and adventures ahead! #USNavyBirthday #NavyVeteran #NavyPride

Ahoy, my fellow landlubbers! Today, we celebrate a day that’s not just marked on calendars but etched into the hearts of millions—October 13, the birthday of the U.S. Navy! Founded in 1775 as the Continental Navy during the American Revolution, our Navy has been sailing the seas of courage, honor, and commitment for 249 years. And let me tell you, being the daughter of a World War II Navy…

[glimblshanks]

It's actually kind of odd to me that even in lower decks, where the main characters being low-level workers is literally the point, we never see enlisted starfleet members.

The warp core four are all ensigns. They're still officers, even if they're junior officers (and tbh, a lot of the work they do is actually work that should be done by noncommissioned petty officers, not ensigns).

This makes some sense for who the characters are. The daughter of a captain and an admiral is obviously going to attend the academy and start out as an officer. Similarly, the heiress of the 5th largest orion syndicate family simply isn't going to be enlisted, I don't care how egalitarian and post-scarcity your utopia is. And someone like boimler who's main goal is to become captain would need to be an officer to achieve that. These choices make sense for the characters in question.

But it does feel weird to me that we never see enlisted members in a show that is literally called lower decks. I mean it's confirmed in multiple episodes of TNG and DS9 that starfleet has enlisted members (which of course they do, starfleet is literally just U.S. Navy In Space) so that seems like an obvious thing to include in the show.

I think the actual reason for this is probably just that mike mcmahan didn't grow up in a military family, learned everything he knows about military rank from star trek, and then when he was first storyboarding and googled navy ranks it was officer ranks that came up first.

Like I'm fairly certain, based on every interview I've seen with mcmahan, and also some of the plots in lower decks, that he just isn't a guy who knows a lot about the military. But honestly, I think that's kind of a bummer because you could milk a lot of comedy out of there being an even lower lower decks that the main four interact with.

[lenaboskow]

being a military brat is only getting your father's approval when you start considering enlisting in the same branch he was

[sweetiebarnes]

The Necklace 

Pairing: Lee Bodecker x Reader 

Word Count: 341

Warnings: Reader being a brat, adultery/cheating, mentions of car sex

A/N: My entry for this week’s challenge for @navybrat817 and @darkficsyouneveraskedfor sleepover! So excited to be apart of the  @the-slumberparty 

You could feel people’s eyes on you. It was risky wearing this necklace tonight. He explicitly told you that you couldn’t wear it out in public. Too many people would ask questions, and the last thing Lee Bodecker needed, was the town to learn about his secrets. No, he couldn’t risk people finding out he was having an affair. An affair with the pastor’s daughter of all people.

You were meant to be the good girl in town. The one that everyone looked up to. It was no secret the kind of reputation that followed Lee. After all, the first time you met him was when he stumbled out of the bar late at night. The smirk on his face when he saw you out so late. It was at that very moment you knew that you’d be hooked. You didn’t learn he was married until a week later.

Week after week Lee would tell you that he planned on leaving her. “Don’tcha darlin’ she’ll be gone soon ‘nough.” But you were tired of waiting around. Sure, sex with Lee was amazing. The nights when he’d split you open in the back of his cruiser. Those nights always helped you forget your worries.

And just the other night when he gave you this diamond necklace, you thought it had meant something more. Your heart raced as you looked down at it. Surely this had to mean something, right? He wouldn’t spend this much on just anyone. But then he told you to only wear it in private. That you needed to continue to be a secret. It felt like a slap in the face.

Tonight you were done being a secret. You were taking this into your own hands. You knew he’d be here at this party. He’d be here with her, and you couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he saw you wearing the necklace. So when someone asked you where you got it, you couldn’t help but confidently say. “I got it from the sheriff.”

[forever-ev]

I would genuinely start tweaking if my kid joined jrotc

[1mnav1]

its brxt bxtch

[compacflt]

okay so something I love in what you've written is the running thematic element of how the "lack" of a character is treated as its own entity/character, not only with Goose--how he’s the “center of the universe” as you say--but also with Sarah. Idk if I just focused hard on Ice’s childhood/adolescence the entire time reading because I’m obsessed with how you wrote him, but the way there were bits and pieces thrown in about her as the story unfolded (Tom's pot-smoking era, the way they grew up so different but had a similar childhood, the unreturned letters and phone calls--also, Ice seeing Chorus Line on Broadway alone was so silly I loved it. Iceman Kazansky: pilot by day, musical theater fan by night. why was he so interested in fucking Chorus Line of all musicals.) but she never actually made an in-the-flesh appearance makes the entire fic, and Ice’s characterization, so dynamic and moving. Like Ice didn’t grow up as a sad little kid with no siblings and some evil overbearing Admiral father that turned him into a Navy-regulated cog in the machine; he had a sister (and grandmother?? A hipster Woodstock grandma?) who loved or at least cared for him a long long time ago, and her presence left a very visible mark (both emotionally and career-wise) on him no matter how “ice cold” he made himself. And in the very very beginning of WWGATTAI, he and Mav were bro-talking about their families and Ice was all like “grr I might as well not have a sister” because he’s secretly Popeye he was grouchy and young and Sarah had stopped talking to him, but then 9/11 happened and he kept trying to get in touch with her just to make sure she’s okay, and then they finally get to talk at the end of Debriefing and it's like...he's reached the top and he's become the person he's always wanted to become, but he's still the exact same. He wants his sister. He's “The Iceman" and can probably run the Navy on his own, but he’s also just someone’s little brother that used to smoke pot with all the other California hippies. He misses her but he can't talk about it.

Also, you didn't just shoehorn her into the story as a character that would be the Tom Kazansky Version of Carole-and-Goose (or as Ice's wife LMAO) and I loved how you gave her personal depth and a purpose/life outside the story while still adding to Ice's characterization through giving him another person to (a) care too much about and (b) shove into his closet of skeletons because the relationship he has with them is breaking some sort of federal regulation. I hope this all makes sense hahaha, but anyway I loved Sarah and how you treated her. It was so entertaining/heartbreaking to watch Ice wrestle with how the main three people he loves are his communist sister, a male romantic partner who is also a subordinate he bails out of sticky situations constantly, and the son of the man he was involved in the death of. crazy stuff.

ok this is so funny & I love this so much because… it wasn't really how I was thinking about it at the time & I'm so glad it comes across as much warmer than how I originally wrote it... okay like i could explain everything but muh “death of the author”…… eh fuck it okay. I’ll put it under a cut so you can choose not to watch me auto-fellate. another long post, sorry. 

so, on Sarah. 

I should start this post by saying straight off the bat that she’s literally just a self-insert for me, the author, as a leftist who lives in New York and would not give someone like Tom the time of day, so I could feel better morally/ethically about writing Top Gun fanfiction. So, there’s that. But she (just like everyone else in this fic) is just a tool to get across information about Ice and the story as a whole, and there’s a reason she was introduced in chapter one (two if you’re reading on AO3 i guess. no prologue, wtf is up with that AO3 you guys need to fix that). I wanted to convey a shitload of information at the start, especially because I was posting semi-weekly and wanted people to know what they were getting into because it’s a slow burn.

To summarize what happens in chapter one:

Goose is dead. 

Ice and Maverick kill some MiGskyites in addition to killing Goose and it cements some weird fucked-up hyperinterdependent relationship between them. 

No, this does not make them instantly friends. They are still fundamentally different people who dislike each other’s outlook on life.

Ice kills some more Soviets and becomes Maverick’s equal, though still not in rank/honor. 

Ice writes to his sister Sarah, who doesn’t answer. 

Ice hooks up with a girl, but finds that he can’t relate to her as much as he did before the experience of TOPGUN. Also, he can’t relate to women at all.

Ice tries to visit Sarah, and is rejected.

Ice sees A Chorus Line on Broadway by himself.

Ice and Maverick talk to each other as semi-equals, and Ice explains that his sister is a Commie who will never talk to him again. He also explains that he wants to get to the top because he thinks it will make him a good man, or that he can make the Navy better because he himself is a good man. Maverick says, yeah right bozo.

So we’re 5,000 words into a 90,000-word fic and already you know the following:

This entire story and everyone in it revolves around Goose’s death and who gets the blame for Goose’s death. 

Ice and Mav are brought together not because they like each other, but because the experience of killing both their friend and their enemies has made it impossible for anyone else on Earth to understand them to that same extent. From the first word, they're already both so fucked-up it really is each other or nobody.

This is gonna be a sloooow burn.

Ice and Mav might end up as superior and subordinate, but they are fundamentally equal ("you can be my wingman anytime/bullshit you can be mine"), and start out as equals. They are now directly responsible for the same amount of death.

Sarah is Ice’s sister, so Ice is definitely not getting married to a woman in this fic. Good news for everyone scared by the slow burn.

Ice had previously had fun with women, and still wants to marry a woman because it "follows all the rules," but after meeting Maverick/the whole TOPGUN experience he finds them annoying/unrelatable. He can’t relate to women at all and doesn't believe this woman when she tells him she loves him because he himself has never been in love with a woman. He is gay.

Ice sees A Chorus Line on Broadway by himself. He is gay. 

Sarah will not be in this fic, and Ice is a categorically lonely man who is isolated from anyone who could possibly help him talk about how he feels. 

Sarah is a Communist who rejected her military brother, not the other way around, so this is a leftist fic from a leftist perspective, but about conservative men whose conservative personal and political opinions will be repeatedly challenged by the end. This is not a pro-Navy story. 

As a corollary to that, the ship for Ice to “be a good man” has already sailed. He’s gonna try his best to be a good man—emphasis on man—throughout the story, but he’s already failed from the very first line. 

And Ice steadfastly and stubbornly refuses to be honest with us or himself about how he feels about any of the above.

So you basically have everything you need to understand the rest of the story. Now you (reader) and I (author) can meet each other in the middle on equal terms, and the real story can actually finally get started in the next chapter. It’s a lot of information. Which is why it’s not written very well and the pacing is fucked. 

But yeah I just used “Sarah” as an expository tool to help first-time readers understand the political lens of this fic from the get-go, so we don’t have to have a lot of hand-wringing when Ice becomes a war hero of the Persian Gulf War or anything like that (though in my a/n for chapter 5 i did admittedly do some hand-wringing. i gotta delete those a/ns). So, Sarah becomes kind of a weak stand-in for Ice’s political guilt. She’s only mentioned four times besides chapter one, i think—once when Ice is with “Laura” (he is still incredibly guilty about all the people he killed & feels like he let “Sarah” down); once with 9/11 (he still thinks about “Sarah” often enough that she’s the first thing he thinks of when the country has been attacked [still haven't decided if this is the real Sarah though]); once when he’s getting high with Maverick (he is constantly reminded by the brass of the ways in which he is not a good man); and once at the end of “Debriefing,” where they actually get to talk to each other—because he has finally “snapped out of it” and left the Navy.

This fic wasn’t meant to be my sorta-kinda-but-not-really-anti-military soapbox preaching, though, which is why Sarah’s hardly in it at all. It’s a D-plot. Maybe even an E-plot. All in service of the Icemav A-plot. That end scene has a couple different purposes, actually. The second is that Sarah, who at this point is pretty much just a stranger, becomes a receptacle for Ice to prove that he can finally be honest with himself and others about his relationship with Maverick. And…that’s pretty much it. I did do more with her in my Slider one-shot but i honestly dk if that’s getting posted at this point (ITS ROUGH) so im not gonna talk about it now. 

But—that was all Sarah as a symbol, which is very un-fun. Sarah as a character is kind of a blank slate, but how Ice thinks about her/misses her is not, as you said :) I’m wary of posting headcanons that are dependent on my fic, though I do have many, because I feel like that’s not really the point of headcanons… “compacflt!Ice-specific headcanons…” idk that seems a little self-aggrandizing even for me. But, yeah, I guess I would characterize my Ice’s childhood as not greeeaaat, because his dad apparently died in Vietnam when he was like eight and his mom apparently died in a car crash when he was twelve (which is why he’s such a good driver [ch 8 notwithstanding DO NOT DRIVE 120 ON I-5]), but also not, like, abusive or anything. Raised by his grandmother (in the Slider one-shot, which I might as well spoil for you since I’m feeling quite hopeless about it, Slider kinda helps Ice deal with her death in the second year they’re at the Academy together, and it’s how their friendship really starts) who might have been hippy-ish and encouraged him breaking the rules, but also he & his sister were very very impacted by the death of their father at war. This is getting kind of deep into it, and I’m just kinda making it up, but I think there was probably a lot of strife between him and Sarah when he was gearing up to go to the Academy/getting his recommendations etc., like actual arguments and screaming matches—yes, she’s disappointed in him, but more than anything she wants to keep him safe so he doesn’t die like their dad (relevant for ice/rooster later)—and he ended up losing her, so it made a deep, deep impression on how he handles (avoids) confrontation about serious stuff like this when he knows he's gonna lose… my ice has a confrontation issue, obviously. but so does canon. see him "apologizing" to maverick for goose's death in the movie for another example of this. bro is struggling.

But thats just me makin shit up so whatever.

But that’s me just makin shit up so whatever.

[raitrolling]

2hr compulsory seminar on managing vicarious trauma? Nah, doodle time

[sixtymillionoverdueideas]

‘Don’t you dare touch them!’ Kyosuke for Sasuke //twinuchiha

Sasuke whirled around, twin kunai at the ready,,,. “Don’t touch him either!!” The Uchiha jinchuurinki snapped, an edge of wildness making his voice a touch deeper -- they were surrounded, in a bubble away from either of their genin-groups and their jounins by Iwa-nin. He itched to... do something,, anything, whisker-marks distorted on his cheeks as a slight snarl curled his lips. 

Be careful, Kurama rumbled as the presence of the Kyuubi pressed closer to the forefront of his mind. Usuratonkachi.

[bleakbluejay]

maybe it's just bc i was raised by a woman who grew up a farm girl during the Great Depression but i just don't understand how people don't use things until they're unusable -- wearing clothes until they fall off and are too threadbare to repair anymore, don't finish their plates (and even more heinous, don't store leftovers and instead opt to throw leftovers away entirely), don't force their old car to run far past the end of its life, don't keep their shoes until they can feel every pebble through the worn-down soles, don't keep their electronics with the glitchy screens until the picture becomes unusable or the damn thing doesn't turn on anymore. we used to fill near-empty bottles of soap and shampoo with water to try to help them last longer. we used to count the exact number of toilet paper squares we used. the living room couch i grew up with was already old and full of holes by the time i was born, and we kept it near 20 years more.it is such a striking cultural difference comparing my family and how we descend and behave from the arms of my great-grandmother and our matriarch, to other people's families that didn't struggle the same, or didn't keep their elders in close enough proximity to be affected by their history. how well did you know your grandparents? did you ever meet your great-grandparents, or hear stories about them?

[belethlegwen]

Me, writing political squabbles so I can get to the first major piece of action I've ever written: But I don't *want* to set up dominoes :C

I just wanna knock them overrrrrr

Why do I have to set them up first :C

[bklynmusicnerd]

Glad Holly get the chance to tell Victor she broke his dick but god, what a shitshow that final Victor showdown was. Holly wasted time bragging, and Drew almost killed Liesl and gave Victor the opportunity to escape.

The worst part is Carly and her ilk are going to try to gaslight the audience into thinking Drew was a hero, but he was genuinely the only person in Greenland who contributed absolutely nothing.

He rescued no one, and he actively made things worse. Nina can ease up on any guilt she might feel about siccing the SEC on him after this tragic display.

[navybrat817]

Listen. I didn't intend for the giggles but I'm glad you did laugh... Also... You now have a new personal affirmation.

Look in the mirror and repeat I am the navy brat any time you need good vibes.

All the good vibes and I appreciate the support after such a long week, sweet nonnie! And that will be my new mantra.

I am the Navy brat.

Love and thanks! ❤️

[deputy-ajay-ghale]

Me praying before entering the TGM tag so I don’t see Purple Hearts themed fics or headcanons/fics by people who don’t know anything about military life except from what they’ve seen from bad Netflix movies: